For a man prone to belittling politicians, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco is proving to be a deft politician.
In his run for governor, he is summoning all the skills he can to shed the political baggage of his hometown, where taming a rowdy parade is the sort of thing that can set off a popular backlash.
He is known outside San Francisco for one thing above all: his renegade order legalizing same-sex marriage in 2004.
So Newsom has been trekking across the state for weeks, trying to show that the "gigantic order-of-magnitude change" he envisions for California entails much more than gay nuptials.
"One thing I'm not is an ideologue," Newsom said Wednesday at a campaign stop in San Diego.
Among other things, the 41-year-old mayor is trying to live down the in-your-face video of him yelling to a crowd that same-sex marriage would someday be legal "whether you like it or not."
Proposition 8 supporters who used it to great effect in ads for the November ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage have made it that much harder for Newsom to cast himself as less left-wing than the average San Francisco politician.
Newsom tried mightily to remake his image on a five-day swing across Southern California that ended Saturday in Palm Springs. While the state is mired in fiscal crisis, he told crowds, San Francisco's bond rating has risen, and its rainy-day fund is robust.
"I'm a hard-headed pragmatist," he told the news media in San Diego. "I haven't been a profligate spender."
In West Hollywood, Newsom turned criticism of his agenda on homelessness into a punch line to prove he can take on liberals.
"My body was burned in effigy at 18th and Castro," he proudly told a gathering of bloggers as he described his program to replace cash grants with stipends for housing and services.
Rival is ready
Even as Newsom markets himself as a centrist, his top rival, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, is questioning Newsom's mainstream appeal. His main line of attack is the case of Edwin Ramos, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant accused of a triple homicide in San Francisco. Ramos had been arrested and released before the killings. Although his case is convoluted, Brown suggested that it could be used to show that Newsom has had a lax attitude toward crime and illegal immigration.
In a January interview, Brown suggested that the Ramos case would become a political "killer" for Newsom.
